For more than two centuries, Dessalines was memorialized as a ruthless brute.

Now, say residents of Brooklyn’s “Little Haiti” —the blocks around Rogers Avenue, home to some 50,000 Haitian-Americans— it’s time to correct the record. They hope the newly renamed Dessalines Boulevard will burnish the reputation of this Haitian hero.

Just after declaring independence, in early 1804, Dessalines discovered that local French colonists were plotting to overthrow his new government. He ordered all remaining French citizens in Haiti, except for a few French allies, to be killed.

Portrait of Jean Jacques Dessalines (Public Domain)

My research indicates that between 1,000 and 2,000 white landowners and their families, merchants and poor French were executed, always in a very public fashion. Some estimates are as high as 5,000.

In June 1803, when Dessalines began planning for independence, he wrote to President Thomas Jefferson.

Like Americans, he reported, Haitians were “tired of paying with our blood the price of our blind allegiance to a mother country that cuts her children’s throats,” he said. They would fight for their freedom.

Jefferson never responded.

Dessalines’ vision of an autonomous black state —a nation founded by enslaved people who killed their colonial masters— alarmed the patrician Virginia plantation owner, Jefferson’s letters show. The U.S. was also being pressured by southern slave states and French and British diplomats to shun Haiti.

Rather than reckoning with the ills of racial oppression and colonialism, most prominent thinkers across the Americas and Europe interpreted Dessalines’ war as an example of African barbarity.

Yet the French continued to use enslaved labor to produce sugar, coffee and other crops in the Caribbean. Dessalines said France had shrouded their colonies in a “veil of prejudice.” He insisted that true egalité required black liberty, too.

The 1805 Constitution that followed reaffirmed the abolition of slavery in Haiti, making it the first free black state in the Western Hemisphere.

It also eliminated official racial distinctions. According to Haiti’s Constitution, all Haitians, regardless of skin color, would be considered black in the eyes of the law. In Dessalines’ philosophy, race was an ideological concept. By securing Haitian citizenship, a person became black.

Haiti’s Rejection on the World Stage

France refused to accept Haitian independence until 1825, when Haitian President Jean-Pierre Boyer agreed to pay 150 million francs —equivalent to US$21 billion today— for the loss of human and territorial “property.” To ensure compliance, French warships with loaded canons threatened the country from the harbor of Port-au-Prince.

As the Haitian-American New York Assemblywoman Rodneyse Bichotte said in Brooklyn, the newly named Dessalines Boulevard is “undoing in a concrete and tangible way centuries of the trivialization of our history.”